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Moving Large Directories on Solaris

When moving or copying really really large directories on Solaris, you can sometimes run into trouble, especially when some of the files in those directories are larger than 8 Gigabytes. One solution is to use a “ufsdump pipe to ufsrestore” command, but I have even had problems with this from time to time. My perfered method these days is to use a “tar pipe to tar” command. Be aware, however, that on Solaris you will need to include the “E” flag if the directory you are copying contains files larger than 8 Gigabytes.

Here is an example. Simply “CD” into the directory you want to copy and execute the following command, replacing “/new/directory” with path to the new destination directory.